""Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite" is an important book that compellingly shows how high theory and cultural studies can be on the same menu. In doing so, "Cultures of Taste" persuasively demonstrates that any serious consideration of our social life must engage with Romanticism in all its historical, textual, and philosophical dimensions. This work is an impressive collection of writings that inaugurates the new field of diet studies in a wonderful manner."--Orrin N. C. Wang, University of Maryland, College Park
"What kind of object is food, and what kind of engagement with the world is eating? The essays in "Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite" take up such unlikely questions with a remarkable combination of historical specificity and theoretical inventiveness. Via juxtapositions--be it dining with Kant or reading fish n' chips--that continually reveal unexpected points of intersection among a wide range of critical perspectives, they demonstrate the extent to which Romantic culture organizes and is organized by an economics, a logic, and a metaphorics of consumption. Together with Timothy Morton's fine introduction and afterword, they argue collectively for an empiricist criticism that would be open to historical experience precisely to the extent that it is conceptually experimental."--Joshua Wilner, City College and The Graduate Center-CUNY


"Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite" brims with fresh material: from fish and chips to the first curry house in Britain, from mother's milk to Marx, from Kant on dinner parties to Mary Wollstonecraft on toilets. It examines a wide variety of Romantic writers: Hegel, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and lesser-known writers such as William Henry Ireland and Charles Piggot. It includes a look at some legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth century, such as the work of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre and Philip Larkin.
"Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite" is a volume of interdisciplinary essays that brings together a wide range of scholarship in diet studies, a growing field that investigates connections between food, drink and culture, including literature, philosophy and history. The collection considers the full range of social, cultural, political and philosophical phenomena associated with food in the Romantic period, reconsidering issues of race, class and gender, as well as those of colonialism, imperialism, and science. "Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite" brings two major critical impulses within the field of Romanticism to bear upon an important and growing field of research: appetite and its related discourses of taste and consumption. As consumption--in all its metaphorical variety--comes to displace the body as a theoretical site for challenging the distinction between inside and outside, food itself has attracted as a device to interrogate the rhetoric and politics of Romanticism. In brief, the volume initiates a dialogue between the cultural politics of food and eating, and the philosophical implications of ingestion, digestion, and excretion.